


Holding me

by protaganope



Category: Hamilton - Miranda
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Nightmares
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-08
Updated: 2018-09-08
Packaged: 2019-07-08 17:15:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,605
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15934850
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/protaganope/pseuds/protaganope
Summary: Alexander Hamilton was dreaming of his mother.Inspired by: “The delirious Alexander was probably writhing inches from his mother when she expired at nine o'clock on the night of February 19 [1767].“





	Holding me

**Author's Note:**

  * For [waitfor_it](https://archiveofourown.org/users/waitfor_it/gifts).



Alexander was dreaming of his mother. 

He must be, he thinks blearily, staring at young, sweating and outstretched palms. Aged maybe twelve, then, sat stagnant in the careful weeks before they had found themselves succumbing to the illness. There is a weight to his chest, and he feels the pain of breathing before he’s fully aware of it.

“Mama?” His voice is quieter, soft with youth and disease, than it has been in a very long time. Alex’s face scrunches up, brows drawn tight and mouth pressed, trying his best not to cry, in that wounded way that only a child who yet lacked the strength to resist could.

It is becoming increasingly difficult to breathe. Alexander is unsure what to make of it.

His mind runs through as many possible scenarios as it is able. As many situations that this could go. There aren’t many.

He’s been pointedly avoiding looking anywhere but his hands. Hands that weren’t even callused yet, Christ. There wasn’t much Alexander had to show for himself at this age, still scrawny without his growth spurt, penniless after his father had left. He could only watch as his mother scrambled to provide for the three of them, since the man who had sired him and his brother had so easily packed up and disappeared.

Of course, James Hamilton hadn’t been happy with just leaving his wife and sons for probable doom. He had to ruin their lives as well, by drawing out the divorce case and raking his mother’s name through the mud.

There was a reason the local church had refused to teach Alexander and his brother, and it wasn’t as if they were slow. He’d heard more than enough for one life of how the _whore’s sons_ didn’t deserve education, since they were damned to Hell either way. Even thinking about it made his stomach twist.

His mother, being the strong woman he remembered her to be, had never let it show, and she was forever beautiful in her smiles. If only she would smile on him, just once, in this dream. This final and faint wish was what his sleep-addled brain desperately knotted together.

But god had never been so kind. Not when Alexander’s faith acted more like smoke than the wick of candles themselves.

Alexander Hamilton was dreaming of his mother. His mother, however, was likely dreaming of absolutely nothing at all. She had, in fact-- and it was only now that the pieces were fitting into place-- already expired.

Vomit immediately lurched up his throat and flooded into his mouth, acrid and hot with sickness. It choked his air and brought tears to his eye, and so he fruitlessly tried to push away from the body weighing him down. Disease had sapped him of any strength he could have mustered and so there he remained, pinned by a corpse. He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t _breathe_.

The body was still warm. Skin oily, clammy with illness that matched him to the blood. What section of hell was this?

That must be it, he found himself thinking, delirious. He’d landed in hell. His own personal selection of torture in which he held no hope of reprieve. The void was open, staring at him with invisible, soulless and unseeing eyes, and him? He’d died, he’d died, he’d died and he was so irretrievably gone—

“Alexander, wake up.”

As though the words had granted him oxygen, Alex is suddenly able to breathe. He springs up from his previous, reclined position, and almost falls off of the bed. The fabric is damp.

His eyes sting. His hands are sweaty.

He just sits there for a moment, breathing raggedly, before the room comes into full view.

He is not in his old house, with its skeleton ceilings and groaning interiors. Not imprisoned in his own faction of hell with no respite except continuity.

Alexander Hamilton is not twelve and trapped on that dreadful island, but in his apartment in New York, thirty years old and engaged to a very much alive body named Aaron Burr.

(The body rests, heavy yet intangible as a ghost can claim, on his chest, and Alex has yet to reclaim himself.)

His mouth is dry, and he tries to swallow but reaps no reward.

“What’s wrong?” Says he, the love of his life. What a bastard, Alex thinks, feverishly trying to make light of it. He looks back into into Aaron’s dark, concerned eyes and thinks of what to say. Hamilton can still feel his fingers pushing into flesh, trying to escape the weight of death.

“Just a bad dream.” It comes out like a scratched record.

Burr, of course, doesn’t take this for an answer, loops his arms around his middle and presses his lips to Alex’s jaw. He’s cooler than Alex, soothes the fire in him.

He suddenly hears a choked sob, soaked in grief, and it takes a moment to recognise the sound as belonging to himself.

This opens the floodgates, and he feels very small as he clings to Burr’s body, presses his face into the juncture between his shoulder and neck. Lets the chemical concoction of pain escape down his cheeks and soak into Burr’s clothes. If Aaron minds, he isn’t immediate in his posture.

(He doesn’t.)

He has been humming carefully, actually, not so loud as to hurt his ears, but enough that it buzzes pleasantly against his torso. It’s an old American rhyme that Hamilton either doesn’t know or just doesn’t remember the words to. They roll back against the sheets. Hamilton can’t stop the stuttering of his breath when Aaron’s weight lands on him, and the humming cuts off.

“You don’t need to tell me, but if you want to, you can. Talk as long as you need.” Came Aaron’s measured voice, always so cautious, halfway on his hackles before making any moves. It had rubbed Alex the wrong way at the beginning of their acquaintance, but he understood the language of Burr now. He wasn’t always sure what would be the right reaction to a situation, so was attentive to any signals Alex could manage. It was endearing.

A beat, and Aaron shifts the two of them so Alex doesn’t have limbs resting on him. The engagement band on his hand catches the light of an outside streetlamp, and Alex reminds himself of where he is, what year it is.

Engaged. They were engaged. Wow.

And to think Alexander used to believe that love wasn’t for him.

He still hadn’t given a response, but as he looks over at Aaron, he’s not looking at him. His eyes have closed. It’s almost as though he were meditating, so deep it was that he appeared at peace. Well, he couldn’t have that.

“Have you met me, Burr? Given opportunity no one else would ever talk.” He mumbled, trying to lighten the mood. He feels more than sees Aaron’s shake of head in response. But it’s true; he’s Alexander Fucking Hamilton. When he starts, he can’t stop. Like now. The words bubble out of him independant of his own accord, but he struggles to verbalise the feeling of panic and helplessness he felt at being trapped. And it was more than that, he realises, speaking with no filter, it represents his whole life, the fear of returning there.

For all Alexander’s talk of being unable to die, he’s often come quite close.

He found himself expanding on this. Trying to make a living as a hand to a trading charter, being separated from his brother and his only friend, the storm, the fire on his way out. All these things imprinted themselves into his skin and every atom of his existence and he couldn’t escape them.

“You don’t need to outrun them, Alexander, all you need to do is admit them. Recogise them.” And then, because he’s a little shit who knows exactly what he can get away with, presses his cold feet into the crux of Alex’s knees. Alex feels Aaron grin against his arm as he lets out a howl, but he doesn’t shove him away.

“Thank you, Aaron.” He mumbles eventually, when they both quieten and sober up. Desperate in his need to convey how he feels, still, he adds, “I love you.”

Aaron just laces their fingers together, and raises his head from his pillow.

“I’m here, as long as you need me for.”

Now, Alex isn’t okay. He hasn’t ever been, not really. A life of trauma and vices has fought him, eaten at his soul, and Alex has devoured it right back but only he has been left to limp home.

But with the dip in the bed beside him, Aaron’s presence? He’s willing to try to be. And that leaves him content.

Aaron’s face in the dark twists, Alex feels his breath on his arm and waits.

“I love you too.” Four words, but they hold so much coming from Burr. Burr who shied away from most of Hamilton’s grandeur and romantic gestures. Burr, who curled in on himself with laughter when Alex told him a particularly good pick up joke. Burr who got nervous for Alex when Washington yelled, who played Alex’s music loud early in the morning to help the two of them wake up. Burr who was to be his future husband.

“Go to sleep, you sap.” Hamilton says, and it would sound harsh at any other time. Here, it’s just fond. Burr chuckles, props his head up with one hand.

“Are you going to join me?” Ah, so he knew. Alex’s heart was so full.

“Soon.” And he meant it.


End file.
